Vi Page 5

  In my case, it was my brothers, my mother, and Hà who knew me better than I knew myself.

  PUDONG

  ~

  east bank

  A YI CONFIRMED that the State was beginning to know Louis and Hà very well indeed, since one day she showed them the notebook containing the names of all visitors and the length of their stay at the house. She had to submit it to the city authorities every week. Someone somewhere in a neon-lit office knew that Hà wrote in Vietnamese in her diary when she suddenly awoke during the night, that Louis owned a Rolex watch from the 1940s that he’d inherited from his father, that the couple made significant donations to Tibetan schools…On the other hand, I’m sure that he did not hear Louis often declaring at breakfast that he woke up beside the most beautiful woman in the world, nor see him savouring the pleasure he derived from caressing Hà’s ebony hair, cut straight across like a Japanese doll’s. Louis would have been able to pick out Hà in a crowd just from the shape of her calves. He gazed at her lovingly every time she referred to herself in the Asiatic manner, placing her index finger on the end of her nose instead of against her chest, as Westerners do. I always saw him walking with Hà’s hand in his.

  Every day, he affixed a new quotation to the bathroom mirror. Hà would invite me to read them with her. Together, we looked for unknown words in the dictionary, and tried to grasp the meaning before Louis returned at the end of the day. “What is your kiss?—The lick of a flame,” by Victor Hugo, enabled Hà to teach me the difference between kissing with the mouth in Western culture and with the nose in Vietnamese. While the one tastes, the other smells, which explains the word thơm (perfume) for requesting or offering a kiss between young Vietnamese. The quotation “If you loved me and I loved you, how I would love you,” by Paul Géraldy, confused tenses. Was the mood wishful or regretful? We did not continue the discussion because Hà reacted very strongly to the word “regret”: “Promise me that you will never have any regrets. Never.”

  BOSTON

  AND SO I DID NOT REGRET having pursued my studies in Quebec rather than in the United States. Hà pictured me spending my evenings in the library at Harvard, where Louis had received his degree in International Relations. He gave us a tour of the university campus, with special emphasis on the library, a gift from Mrs. Widener in memory of her son who had died on the Titanic. A hundred years later, the university still places a bouquet of fresh flowers in the room containing Harry’s collection of 3,300 books, according to his mother’s wishes. The library of my grandfather Lê Văn An probably contained the same number of books in French and Vietnamese.

  As soon as the first Communist tanks rolled into Saigon, my grandfather ordered us to burn any books with political content. Over the following weeks, we also tore up the history books, the novels, and the collections of poetry, in order to eliminate at least one accusation of treason: possession of anti-revolutionary instruments. In times of chaos, it’s better to be a concierge than a philosopher, a carpenter than a judge. The police took my grandfather away one afternoon in the middle of his chess game with Long. He was released three days later, probably because, as a judge, he’d been able to free his friends in the resistance. Or perhaps because the police chief had been touched by the light of the full moon that cloaked the partially paralyzed body of my grandfather, stretched out on the bench under the guava where he had been kept captive. After his return, the sound of his cane against the tiling underscored the absence of servants, including the one responsible for dusting the books.

  If my grandfather had not left us so soon, he would have persuaded my mother to allow me to live in a college dormitory in the United States, even if my opinions on the compulsory course in sexuality in school frightened her. She had signed the authorization while reminding me of the importance of virginity. For a long time, I thought it was my adolescent hormones that had made me reply: “A body is not a thing. So it can’t be new or used or second-hand.” Time taught me that this way of seeing things came more from Hà and from an article in the Reader’s Digest, concerning the rapes at sea suffered by boat people.

  When I read that, I was fifteen. No boy had even noticed me at the flower table, where I took their dollar in exchange for a Saint Valentine’s carnation for the graduates’ fundraising campaign. I was as transparent as the petals on the skeleton flower in the rain, even if I was one of the best students in my school. I knew how to disappear so as not to embarrass my friend in front of her companions. Without having given each other clear signs, we knew how to avoid making eye contact when we met in the corridor or the cafeteria. No one suspected that we talked every day on the phone after school hours. I knew about her obsession with knitting, and she, my compulsion for covering each of my books in wrapping paper bought in secret to preserve their status as “presents” all year long. Every dollar I spent on these packages of paper that were “marked-down markdowns,” as Marguerite Duras might have said, could have fed a member of my family in Vietnam for three or four days. This was my first selfish act, and also, my first act of love. My books shielded me from my mother’s criticisms of my sister-in-law, Hoa. Without them, I would perhaps never have seen the sublime in the blue eyes of Clément, seated at the back of the class with his cheeks as pink as candy apples. They also gave me the courage to refuse the offer of one of my mother’s friends to introduce me to “a boy who’s somewhat timid,” like me.

  RIMOUSKI

  MY MOTHER KNEW nearly all the mothers, since she worked with the Quebec Association of Vietnamese Women. She often cooked for the New Year’s celebration that took place at Complexe Desjardins in Montreal, where all the Vietnamese living in the province converged. In Vietnam, it was very important for my grandparents to see the right person cross the threshold on the first day of the New Year. That person’s visit foretold the success or bad fortune that would characterize the year to come. In Quebec, the Vietnamese had abandoned this tradition, because the date of the New Year varied from one year to another between January 21 and February 20, and never fell on a holiday. And so we celebrated Tet on the Sunday preceding the true first day of the lunar year, by meeting in a space vast enough to accommodate the several thousand visitors and, most of all, to set up our food stands.

  In contrast to most poor immigrants, we allowed ourselves to spend money with no second-guessing, no feelings of guilt. The restaurants and caterers took in a month’s earnings in one day, and the community organizations completed their annual fundraising. The Association of Vietnamese Women probably came out on top, because the fierce but supportive competition among those who wanted to show off their culinary prowess raised the standard of dishes on offer. And so, those Sunday mornings before Tet, Hoa and I woke very early to prepare the herbs, the thin slices of pork, the shrimp cut lengthwise in two before being wrapped in rice paper. Even if we were three people with different hands, all the rolls had to be the same size, including the three centimetres of garlic chives that proudly protruded like antennae. The young people bought those rolls, the stuffed dumplings, the hot pies, the manioc cake, while the mothers circulated among the stands to eye the young unmarried girls a friend or acquaintance had recommended for their sons.

  It was during one of these celebrations that a woman talked to my mother about a boy who lived in Rimouski. She was of the opinion that he would make a good husband for me, because our astrological signs were compatible. “He’s not very handsome, but he works hard, like your daughter, Vi.” My mother wanted a strong man for me, given that I seemed timid and drab. She smiled politely at the woman. “Thank you, you’re right. But we mustn’t make him come from so far away, the poor boy.” In the midst of the brouhaha, I suddenly heard the word “intrinsic,” uttered by a young man talking to his friends in the line in front of our stand. I didn’t know that word, only the sister of the person who had pronounced it. She was in charge of the cash beside me. I was very intimidated by how people referred to her as “the most beautiful young Vietnamese girl.” To my great s
urprise, she approached me and complimented me on my straight, dark hair, and on my lashes, thick, but hidden under the folds of my eyelids. At our first break, she led me into the ladies’ washroom to apply mascara that would highlight the true length of my lashes, whose very existence had escaped me until this revelation. She introduced me to her brother, Tân, holding my hand as if we were old friends. I stood there open-mouthed, because Tân’s word “intrinsic” had intrigued me, and his smile stole my heart on the spot.

  ROME

  TN WAS eight years older than me. By pure chance, he’d moved from Montreal to Quebec City for his work and became a close friend of my three brothers, thanks to badminton. He came to the house so often that he had his own key, just like the many families who had lived with us on their arrival in the country. Never mind the size of our house or of the families, my mother opened wide our doors to shelter the FOBs—“fresh off the boats”—for as long as they wanted. There was so much coming and going that, once, my brother Loc encountered a thief in the house and didn’t bat an eye, thinking he was someone’s friend. The criminal went off with the car key, which had been left in plain view, since we shared everything the same way. Until the police found the car, Tân politely and generously made his vehicle available and acted as chauffeur when necessary, which gave me the opportunity to spend some time alone with him.

  Thanks to my brother Linh, who made a request to his employer, I was able at the age of sixteen to work for the same company. I spent my evenings in a huge empty office printing insurance policies, cheques, complaints, and other paperwork, which enabled me to do my homework and study in between feeding fresh sets of forms into the printer. When there were no mistakes, I finished around ten o’clock. But the machines and computer programmes broke down at the same rhythm as the natural catastrophes or accidents that befell the insured. When that happened, I missed the last bus. Tân then offered to fetch me, since I was the one who hemmed his new pants and ironed those that had just been washed.

  Like my mother with my father, like Hoa with Long, I came to love him slowly, patiently, counting and noting the number of times per week he pronounced my name. I hung his winter coat over the radiator to keep it warm. I refilled his glass with beer so it would stay cold. I placed biscotti beside his coffee to keep alive his adolescence in Rome, the city where his father had lived as a Vietnamese foreign student and, later, as an Italian engineer. Tân introduced us to spaghetti carbonara and therefore to pancetta and parmigiano. He struck up songs in Italian, and imitated Pavarotti. He exposed us to La Dolce Vita and all the other films with Marcello Mastroianni. He showed my mother and me the paso doble, the tango, the cha-cha-cha. Santana’s “Black Magic Woman” still turns round in my head to the rhythm of his “one, two, cha-cha-cha.” For many of the people living in our house, these spontaneous lessons quickly turned into parties where Linh proudly played his cassette mix-tapes.

  Those festive days came to an end when Tân’s employer called him back to Montreal to work on a new project. His departure gave me the daring idea of following him, of applying to study translation in Montreal universities, of challenging the authority of my mother and brothers. I turned away from their disappointed and uneasy looks. For a long time I had convinced everyone, including myself, that I would become a surgeon, like my first friend in Quebec. She had one day led me to a school library to show me pictures of her dream-to-be. I had not yet acquired the power to dream, so I copied her. I appropriated her ambition, to the point of immortalizing it in my graduation yearbook. There was nothing I had to explain since it pleased everyone and satisfied their expectations. That was why my decision to study translation unnerved my small community. Everyone feared for the precariousness of my future, while they really ought to have worried about my almost total ignorance of the English language and, to a lesser degree, of French. Despite their disapproval, my three brothers slipped money into my pocket the day I moved. At the door to my room in the university residence, my mother said to me, very slowly, in a solemn voice: “When you see that you’ve made a mistake, I ask you to have the courage to admit it and to start again somewhere else.”

  UN

  ~

  United Nations

  I NEVER HAD the courage. I amassed zeros, alone in the half-light of my room. I consoled myself by thinking that at least I was protecting my mother from my failures by keeping my distance from her. Those repeated bad marks reminded me that I ought to continue reading about grammar in my Grevisse, lugging it around in my bag all the time, even if its weight sometimes made me tip over into puddles of water in springtime and onto sheets of ice in winter. Certainly I made progress, leafing through dictionaries, but the difficulties I had day after day persuaded me that I would never be an interpreter for the United Nations in New York, as Hà had hoped. Lacking courage, I persevered through the three years of study, and obtained a degree that I didn’t deserve. I see myself again at that time, back bent and head lowered, weighed down by shame as much in the classroom and school corridor as among Tân’s family.

  My brothers had assigned Tân the task of looking out for me. And so, at least once every two weeks, he invited me for a family dinner at his parents’, with whom he still lived. Sometimes he entrusted me to his sisters, who included me in their evenings with other Vietnamese Montrealers. On balconies, around tables, the friends of Tân and his sisters discussed their grades and the specialization they would choose after their studies in medicine, the pharmacies they intended to buy, the dental clinic they would open in one neighbourhood or another still lacking a Vietnamese presence. No one was interested in my story about a brilliant professor who had interpreted a quotation from Shakespeare by citing an equivalent one from Molière, and even less my list of “false friends” between French and English. Does “habit” mean habitude in English because men often wear the same habit, or suit? How did “bribe” become pot-de-vin, a jug of wine, in French? Is gentillesse so mild that gentil has been transformed into “gentle”? I bored those people with my fascination with disconcerting similarities and differences. But despite the lack of interest on either side, I turned to snag a smile from Tân, to refresh my memory of the sound of his voice, to snare a new movement of his hands.

  CHIBOUGAMOU

  ~

  meeting place

  I WOULD NEVER have obtained my degree in translation without Jacinthe, my classmate from Chibougamou who became a close friend. Jacinthe had been touched by my naiveté when I’d asked the meaning of “rhetoric” and the gender of the word “catastrophe” during an assignment in our first year. She persuaded me to continue my training even though a professor had strongly recommended I switch faculties on account of my disastrous results. I’d never before come last in a class, but I was able to survive the humiliation of my shameful grades thanks to Jacinthe’s kindness. She dragged me to boutiques, cafés, and parks, promising to help me complete my assignments at the library on the way back, to make up for lost time. She imposed dance breaks as relief from the long work sessions. Wednesday evenings were reserved for free museum visits. Together, we learned the names of painters, and I absorbed Jacinthe’s enthusiasm.

  She introduced me to her friends and acquaintances, calling me Lovely Vi, and insisted that Tân respond in the affirmative when she asked, “Isn’t she lovely, our Vi?” Tân nodded politely, without sharing her opinion. I imagined him listening to the remarks of his mother: “Vi is tall, but so dark”; “Poor little thing! But at least she’s polite.” That is why I would never have thought that Tân would kiss me one night in the parking lot behind the Japanese restaurant where I worked every Friday and Saturday. The odours in my hair of grilled eel and sukiyaki mixed with that of tempura made his aftershave intoxicating. He probably only brushed my thighs, but my whole body seemed to have been touched.

  I awaited our next meeting, reading the dictionary of synonyms and antonyms, and knitting along with Jacinthe and her roommates. When Tân finally turned up, he offered me a plastic dais
y stolen from his mother’s floral arrangement instead of a real one. He didn’t have to bring any desserts to our private meals in my room because I already had everything he liked in the refrigerator. Even though I didn’t drink coffee, he would find a freshly brewed cup every morning he awoke in my bed. He came when it suited him, as I had inserted my key into his key ring even before he expressed a desire to have it.

  CÔTE-DES-NEIGES

  ~

  snowy hill

  JACINTHE HAD PERSUADED ME to share an apartment with her on Côte-des-Neiges after we obtained our degrees, so that we could continue studying together, this time in law. Tân spent even more nights with me in the comfort of the nest Jacinthe had created, with its deep-red wall in the living room and the canvases of her painter friends all over. Tân’s prolonged and repeated absences made his parents very angry. They summoned me for a lecture on Vietnamese customs and values, concluding with some parental advice: “Think of the gratitude you owe your mother before you keep humiliating her like this.”

  I hoped that Tân would defend me, defend us, defend himself. To my great surprise, he was also of the opinion that girls from good families did not offer themselves so completely to a man. But out of laziness, ease, comfort, he didn’t leave me.

  The news had reached my mother’s ears through people I had never met. After my first exam in constitutional law, she accosted me outside my apartment. No sooner had she crossed the threshold than my knees were already bent, flat on the floor. She did not take off her coat, because she had only two sentences to say: “I failed in your education. I have just come to look my failure in the face.” She left as quickly as she had come, with my brother Lộc, who was waiting in the car. I later found, in the mailbox, an envelope filled with hundred-dollar bills, and a letter from my three brothers, saying: “Come to see us during your reading week, if you can.”